The application and practice of unit quaternion method in aerial triangulation

In this paper,the unit quaternion method is introduced into the aerial triangulation applications and the empirical results are assessed.Firstly,the rotation matrix is constructed with unit quaternion and the expressions for calculating 3 rotation angles from rotation matrix are given,and P-H algorithm is introduced to solve relative orientation functions and the accuracy expressions of coplanarity equations are given.Then the bundle block adjustment model is constructed with unit quaternion and the error equation and its coefficient matrix are given.At last,relative orientation and bundle block adjustment tests were done using actual aerial images,which were compared with the traditional Euler angles-based rotation matrix construction.The test results showed that in the relative orientation test,if P-H algorithm is engaged,that is,anti-symmetric matrix are used to help solve the unit quaternion parameters,all the test data could get right results.While in the bundle adjustment,method based on unit quaternion shows poorer stability than the traditional one,and the unit quaternion method is influenced greatly by the scale of photography and number of control points,which results in that some test data could not be convergent correctly.